


Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

by giallarhorn



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 05:19:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1498105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giallarhorn/pseuds/giallarhorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s good at waiting. So when he says he’ll come back, that he always comes back, she doesn’t really believe him. As a child, when adults said later, it meant probably never.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

**Author's Note:**

> Prose study/reflection for the scene in Flesh and Stone, when Amy gets left behind, and they keep on leaving her. Spoilers from Flesh and Stone.
> 
> Title is from the Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke

            Thirty thousand years ago, Amy Pond is asleep on her bed and thinking about her wedding. Wondering if it’s the right move, if it’s what she wants. Nervous and sick to her stomach thinking about it.

            Fourteen years before that, she waited outside her house and he never came.

            She’s good at waiting. So when he says he’ll come back, that he always comes back, she doesn’t really believe him. As a child, when adults said _later_ , it meant _probably never_.

            It’s worse when she can’t see, so much worse.

            She knows that she should believe him. That she should trust him but if she said she did, it’d be a lie. So when he tells her to trust him, that it’s never been more important, and that she needs to remember, she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

            She can only remember the promise that he made to her as a little girl, and how he never came back.

            He always keeps her waiting.

           

 

            The shape. She knew that shape, better than anything. The crack in the wall.

            It shouldn’t be here. It couldn’t be here. How could it be here? This far in the future, how could it be here.

            So when she asks about the other two, the two who went before and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she knows that something is wrong.

            The worst part of it all is that she can’t see any of this and they keep leaving her.

            She wishes she paid more attention to what he was saying, but is not sure that it would have made a difference.

 

 

            When the last one leaves, she begs that he comes back. And just like that, without another sound or a whimper or anything- he’s gone. They’re all gone, all of them. Forgotten, all of them. None of them remembered each other, the ones who came before. She doesn’t even know when they’re gone, because she can’t see them. She should be worried for them, the men who had laid down their lives to defend her- a strange girl they didn’t know. They were gone, wiped from existence, so it shouldn’t bother her that she’s been left behind.

            The hurt and the words and memories hang in the air, thirty thousand years apart, still fresh.

            Time doesn’t heal all wounds.

 

 

 

            They were all dead and gone, and she wondered, somewhere, who would be left to remember them if she dies here.

            The Angels are coming.

            They’re around her and the worst part is, she can’t even open her eyes to see them. That’s the real terror- the terror of being alone, except she wasn’t really alone but she couldn’t see them. They could kill her, and she wouldn’t ever know better. Couldn’t even see, wouldn’t even see them coming. Left alone in the dark - _every angel is terrifying_. Whoever had said that, smart bloke he must have been.

            Here, in a forest on a spaceship on another planet, thousands of years after she was born and died- she might die. Worse than die; be erased, never born or existed. It was a strange thought. Was it this, this sort of closure?

            The hardest thing is not opening her eyes, keeping them closed and making herself move. But when he tells her, _orders_ her to move, she decides then that the Doctor can’t have intended to leave her here, alone, by leaving without her. He hadn’t meant to break the promise.

            It’s just how she ended up. And so, she moves, following the frantic beeping of the communicator in sync with her heartbeat.

            She wonders, if the light reached her before the Angels did, if he would even remember if he had left her behind at all.

            Or she would be alone, and no one would remember her at all.

            Like the men.


End file.
